GitHub has open sourced Janky, their Continuous Integration server built on top of Jenkins and augmented with Hubot, a chat automation tool.
Beside the usual Jenkins functionality, Janky adds the capability provided by Hubot, another project open sourced by GitHub two months ago. Hubot monitors chat conversations and reacts based on some words exchanged by participants. For example, if it encounters the word “problem?” it inserts a troll face. It can interact with Google Image API or Maps API, does mathematics, translates between languages. It can do many things.
Hubot is highly flexible being based on scripts, and anyone can write his own scripts extending the basic functionality. Scripts are written in CoffeeScript and hubots are running on Node.js, and are currently configured to be deployed on Heroku’s platform (for free according to a GitHub blog post), but it is not difficult to configure them for other cloud platform.
Hubot is also integrated with Jenkins, notifying it when sources are changed using GitHub’s Repo Hooks API. While Hubot was initially a chat enriching application, it ended as a wrapper around Jenkins.
Janky was open source under a MIT license.
